


the wilderness will not let me go

by AvaRosier



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dark!Clarke, Gen, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 10:39:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3647226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvaRosier/pseuds/AvaRosier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke doesn’t wonder what kind of monsters she’ll be trapped with this time. Because now she has become the monster, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the wilderness will not let me go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toflowerknights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toflowerknights/gifts).



There’s blood on the sleeve of her favorite pink sweater.

 

This upsets Clarke more than anything, more than the heaving rattle in Cage’s body as he tries to crawl away from her. The dark blood seeping from his gut leaves a big fat trail across the concrete.  This had been her favorite sweater—people always said she looked cute in it and cute meant happy and normal.

But now the blood taints it. In the dim yellow lights glowing down on the abandoned parking lot, she can make out the faint mist flying through the air. The moisture is slowly seeping into her hair and her skin, making it all worse.

“Pl-please…” He moans faintly, clutching at the handle to his car. Clarke breathes in deeply and stalks closer until she’s standing over him once more. Kicking at his other arm, she sends him down to the ground again and knocks him onto his back. Red bubbles out the side of Cage’s mouth and his eyes are wild and desperate.

“I never wanted to be a killer” she tells him, quite calmly. “But you were going to slaughter my people for their marrow. I had to irradiate the air in Mt Weather, I had to kill hundreds of innocent civilians... _children_...because of you.” Her tongue is thick as the familiar memory of dread fills her.

Cage is shaking his head. “No, no I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady! I’m just an accountant. Please, I have a wife and two children, I can’t—“

She swings the scalpel in an arc across his throat, finger brushing across the stubble there. It takes seconds for him to bleed out and for the life to fade from his eyes.

 

 

They tell her she was a honor roll student, that she played soccer and loved to draw and paint. That she was a bit of a partier, but that hardly had to be a bad thing when she was on track to graduate near the top of her class and go to her choice of top-notch colleges. None of it matters because she doesn’t remember that life. She remembers the Ark, the dropship, the grounders, Mt Weather, and impossible choice after impossible choice.

And she doesn’t understand why they don’t remember, too.

Bellamy had been the first, and she hadn’t really meant to. It’s just that she had expected him to believe her, out of everyone else. But here he was just her friend’s jerk of an older brother. He’d laughed in her face and looked away from her when he called her crazy. He really hadn’t been expecting her to grab his service pistol and fire it without blinking.

 

Her blood doesn't sing when she kills; she just feels hollowed out . Like she's become the Abyss. If only. Then she could bring back her dead and expunge them from her lungs. This is where she feels most at home now, in that void space where she once existed.

 

 

This world was wrong. It was easy and bright and loud. She could walk into a building and sit down with a meal, just like that. There were so many people and she was surrounded by things. She hates them so much when she walks past them—the ones her age who can just smile and laugh because it’s that simple for them.

 _This is a lie_ , she wants to scream at them. _This is an illusion!_

 

 

She doesn’t remember this world, so it’s not too surprising, in hindsight, that she’s caught fairly quickly. This Clarke doesn’t know about surveillance cameras or the types of paper trails a person can leave in their wake. It’s not as easy to disappear, even if she knows how to live in the woods and find food. They take her to a place with white walls and something inside her rib cage shifts and rages as she remembers Mt Weather. The Skybox.

Solitary confinement, she can do because she can sit there and be patient and map a path inside her head to the exits in this building. They try to give her drugs, but Clarke finds ways around swallowing them. The doctors smile with pity and patiently explain to her that her delusions about the future are just that, delusions.

 _You’re creating these traumatic events that never happened, Clarke. You can’t be changed by things that never happened_. The nametag on the doctor’s white coat says ‘Dr. Lorelai Tsing’.

Clarke doesn’t wonder what kind of monsters she’ll be trapped with this time. Because now she has become the monster, too.

 

Dr. Tsing works late on Thursday nights, and that’s when Clarke makes her move, knowing that attendant patrols are light that night ever since two of them had left in the past month and had yet to be replaced. Dr. Tsing is tiny, and easy to knock out and transport to the procedure room. With the old-fashioned medical drill she had found in the Institute’s museum, Clarke waits for her to wake up.

She wonders if this is how their eyes looked…Harper’s, Raven’s, her mom’s…when they were strapped in like this: wild and uncomprehending. She wonders if Dr. Tsing had felt this kind of power when she had stood here.

“Clarke? What are you doing? Let me go before you make it worse for yourself!”

Vengeance doesn’t satisfy. She already knows this. But it isn’t fair that some people just get to walk around this world as if they’re innocent, not when she’s tormented by what she does remember. This doctor had been wrong. Her Bellamy had been wrong. Who you are and who you become in order to survive are not two different people, and in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter whether the world with the Ark and the Tri Kru actually exists or if it’s just a figment of her imagination. She remembers it, therefore it defines her.

“I’m extracting your bone marrow,” She tells the struggling doctor, turning on the drill. Clarke ignores the screams—those, she’s gotten used to—and poises the needle over one frantically squirming leg. That Clarke, who kicked around soccer balls with her father, had never studied medicine, she knew very little about anatomy; but this Clarke knows how to heal.

She can be precise.


End file.
